For whatever reason you may have, one day you might find yourself wanting to delete a Facebook account. Perhaps you had a few accounts and want to delete the extra ones. Maybe you want to start fresh and add as friends only the people who mean a lot to you these days. Or maybe your slightly-changed surname wasn’t enough to stop the people who you’re hiding from from finding you.

Despite your reasoning for wanting to do so, deleting a Facebook account can actually be a little tricky. This is because Facebook want to give you every possible opportunity to change your mind, so if you use your account in any way your deletion process will need to be restarted. Today we’ll take you through the steps to make deleting your Facebook account as simple as possible.

Has Your Account Been Hacked?

If the reason you’re considering deleting your Facebook Account is because your account got hacked, you should probably read these articles first. You may find you can solve your hacking problem and salvage your Facebook account.

Can You Still Log In To The Account You Want To Delete?

Even if you can no longer log in to your Facebook account, there are ways to gain access to it or to just delete it. For instance, it’s possible to get several trusted friends to help you prove to Facebook that the account is yours. Conversely, if you just want to delete it and you think someone else has hacked the account you can report it as being compromised and Facebook staff will delete it for you. More details can be found in this article:

Prepare Your Groups & Pages For Your Account Deletion

If the account you wish to delete is an admin of a Facebook page or group, ensure you add another account of yours or some good friends as administrators before you delete the account. If you’ve put a lot of work into your page, you will want to ensure it’s left in good hands. This is especially important if you administer a page for a business you work for as you will create a big headache for them if no-one else is made admin before you delete your Facebook account.

Remove All Apps From Facebook

When deleting your account, Facebook requires that you do not log in for two weeks after your request is made. This means that if you accidentally log in to another website using your Facebook credentials during that two week period you’ll have to re-start the deletion process. So, in order to ensure there are no accidents, you’ll need to delete all the applications associated with your account.

To delete Facebook applications, head to your Facebook home page and click on “App Center” on the left, then choose “My Apps” from the menu on the left. Now, just keep clicking the crosses on the right-hand side to get rid of them all. When they are all deleted, you’ll still need to remember not to re-enter your Facebook details on any site or in any application during that two week period.

Note: It is also recommended that you remove linked accounts too. For instance, you have linked Google and Facebook if you have set up your account so that you’re logged into Facebook whenever you are logged into Google. However, the option to remove linked accounts is no longer in Account Settings > Linked Accounts (as Facebook still claim it to be), so I can only presume linked accounts are now controlled via your applications list or no longer exist.

Delete Your Facebook Account, Don’t Deactivate It

Don’t be confused between deactivating and deletion. If you deactivate your account via Account Settings > Security then Facebook will still keep all of your information from the account safe in case you ever want to reactivate the account. It’s not the same as deletion!

It will give you a message reminding you to ensure you don’t log in for two weeks, but then it will helpfully log you out before you have a chance to read it properly. Note that if you change your mind at any point in the next two weeks all you need to do is log into Facebook and the deletion process will be cancelled.

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monie hall

March 23, 2017 at 1:40 am

I only need to keep one facebook account which is the one I'm using now. I need Facebook to delete my old accounts. I do not know any of my information to get into them because of previous phones. I got new phone and didn't log out of old accounts either time. Please help

Thank You Ange for this well thought out post! Highly Appreciated! Did Leave FB following this method, BUT as an added safety, Deleted Each and Every Single Post, whatever was there in Friends List, Apps, Messages, Likes, etc, Before Doing so.

Some Things to Note Though:
1. Deleted Posts kept reappearing despite having taken the Oh So Long Damn Time to Delete Them Individually! Had to Redo the delete process of items multiple times and Hit Refresh to see if they were actually gone, until I hit Home and there were NO Posts, Think it's some sorta emotional blackmail or social engineering tactic because I was repeatedly seeing the birthday messages reappearing after already having deleted them. Still Deleted Them nonetheless! : |

2. Checked each and every tab with it being Blank, Of course, name wasn't allowed to be blank! Furthermore, if you want to get rid of the friends list you have to hover over Each Box and remove one by one! Having more than 350+ (so called) friends on my list, my fingers were numb hitting the mouse button twice each time, one for the Unfriend option and one for the stupid ARE YOU SURE question! Grrr!

I really pity those with a huge list! Wait till the day comes that they decide to delete their facebook account! Trust Me, I think They'll Defo Off themselves rather than go through the Real Sick and Time Consuming Process! Well I managed it in some long spent hours over two days and left with a backache, but it beats a freakin' regular migraine headache any day!

3. Also In the list part of things and the items in the side columns, there's NO Damn Option of a Delete most of the time, just archive or edit or even more stupid Add to Favorites! some will show remove or hide. Things seem to be willfully set in such a way to either cripple the deletion process or irritate a person no end by making the process one helluva delayed issue!

Worse still is the fact that despite having done so much and wasting time, You Are NOT 100% sure that all Data will be deleted/retained thanks to the so called SuperCookies, Pixels, Clouds(lol) or whatever else they can think of! People think once they're logged out of facebook they're safe! Yeah Right! Think Again!

4. I think that the next action by the EFF and Privacy Concerned Organizations should be to Make it Compulsory for Facebook to Delete ALL Data of a User WITHOUT Retention in One or Two Steps, and IMMEDIATELY! And not in the BS time frame mentioned now of 14 days or even more claiming data retention of nearly 3 months.

It already makes users download their so called data and extended data archive before deleting account, then what's the reason for delay?! One would have to be absolutely paranoid hoping that there's no sort of hidden malware/spyware in the archive that pings back stuff after the account is deleted! Going btw things are these days, Not Highly Impossible given the history of its roots! Call Me Paranoid, or Tinfoil Hat, But One Day, I'll See Who Has the Last Laugh and Says, I Told You So! :P

REALLY SORRY for the Long Post my impatient friends! I know how the Diminished Attention Span Disease has hit people on facebook, so my sincere apologies, But if you had the patience to read thus far, God Bless your Patient Little Soul and I think there's a Chance You Just Might Be Saved in Time! ;) All the Best and May Your Will Be Strong! Power to the People! Peace Out!

I'm really glad that you cleared up the difference between 'deactivation and deleting' and the 2 week waiting period along with the linked services. Facebook sure doesn't make it easy for us! Thanks very much :-)

Good article there. This happened to my friends last week. They asked me to delete their account because they could not find the option to delete it. Well, they were busy chatting, viewing pictures, clicking on the Like and Comment buttons. That was the main reason for cancelling their account. Wasting too much time on facebook.
Bye bye facebook.

Just a heads up, Facebook still stores your information for months after deleting your account. A good practice (and what I did) is to overwrite all of your information with bogus information before you wipe it, so whatever is stored is not the real thing.

That's interesting - I might do this. I've been debating it for a while. I use my facebook account for this website though - is there a way to transfer my account here to a different set of credentials, like twitter? Or even a new facebook if I decide to make one.